'The Passage of Love opens with first-person modern-day Robert Crofts, who at the end of his career as a writer is struggling to find the creative impulse for his next book. He visits a women's prison to give a talk and is captivated by a particular inmate who explains his previous work to him, saying, "I thought he was explaining himself to his mother as a way of explaining himself to himself" (12). This is an on-ramp to what the bulk of the novel will grapple with: Robert Crofts telling himself his own story.' (Introduction)